Because This Too Has to Be Survived

This story is one of the chapters from our book A Woman's World, created together with Miklós Vámos.

The camera clicks, and all I hear Norbi say is: "This picture is so beautiful. Tell me about your journey — we're making a book."

I didn't want to look back, but then one morning I picked up a pen…

I was born 45 years ago in a village near the border, in the Partium region of Transylvania, barely seven kilometres from the Hungarian frontier. Survival has been one of the defining themes of my entire life. Even as a small child, I knew that somehow I was different from most of the people living around me — and no, I don't mean in terms of sexuality.

When I looked at the women in my family, all I saw was complaining, resignation and ageing before their time. I didn't want that. In a small village like ours, a girl married young, and then the treadmill began. Even that frightened me. Then came my parents' endless arguments.

I was barely ten when my little brother burst into my afternoon class in tears one day and cried, "...come, Kati, Mum is dead!" I ran home with him and then to the doctor's surgery so someone could examine my mother. Fortunately, she had only fainted after an argument with my father. Two more long years of this followed before my parents finally divorced.

There was barely a year of peace at my maternal grandmother's house before my mother, partly out of defiance, married a man with three children who was five years younger than she was. Ten terrible years followed. My mother saw none of it — or didn't want to — but for me it was awful. In the meantime, I became a teenager. Home was such an unhappy place that I couldn't enjoy any of the beautiful experiences of adolescence.

I thought I was ugly, and boys didn't seem to notice me either. But I was wrong. I was so consumed by everything happening at home — the arguments, the endless work, the feelings all of it created — that the sadness radiating from me pushed everyone away. I escaped into books.

All I knew was that I had to survive this too. I had to look after my mother and my little brother because the three of us were one another's small family and safe place. Meanwhile my stepfather drank more and more, and I could feel him beginning to look at me not as a child, but as a woman.

When I turned eighteen, I still hadn't had a boyfriend. My stepsister, who was the best friend of my life — I have never loved anyone quite as deeply and purely since — told me the situation was becoming ridiculous. I needed to have my first real experience, she said, because apart from me only the younger ones were still virgins.

She kept talking until I agreed. We went on a trip, and they brought along a boy who was supposed to serve the purpose. My first sexual experience happened, but without love it meant very little. I didn't even know what being in love felt like, and I also denied myself the experience of a man making an effort to win me.

That first encounter grew into an eight-year on-again, off-again relationship with a lot of pain and some good moments. The sex was good. I learned about it from books and, slowly experimenting, taught my partner as well. If the relationship had begun without emotion, at least the physical part worked. I wanted to escape from home, so I held onto him. I thought happiness simply meant that someone finally loved me too.

I didn't realise that I didn't love or respect myself enough for someone else to truly love me, fight for me and respect me. Deep down, I knew the relationship wasn't right. Meanwhile, my mother became increasingly ill. This marriage had become bad for her too, and after ten years she divorced again. By then her health had deteriorated badly. We moved back in with my grandparents, and I ended the relationship with my boyfriend.

Around that time I met the man who would become my husband. He was barely eighteen; I was twenty-six. At first I didn't pay much attention to him, and we only got together because of a bet. By then, years of conflict and pain had hardened my soul.

It felt good to step out of the old troubles. There was no stepfather anymore, no old boyfriend for whom I had forever been the "almost" woman. I stood there with a blank page in front of me and felt that I had survived this too.

My mother's condition was terrible. She was ill, betrayed and abandoned, a woman who had always suffered because of her weight while at the same time being unable to resist food. A vicious circle. Perhaps that is where my almost phobic fear of gaining weight comes from.

I had always been rebellious, the person who stood outside the line. I began to think that maybe my previous failures had happened because of that, so I started behaving the way people expected me to. I tried to become the kind of woman who would make a "proper wife".

Despite his young age, my husband stood up to his family and loved me with almost worshipful devotion. We were together for five years. I finished teacher-training college, and he completed his military service. By then I was over thirty. We got married.

It felt wonderful to be immersed in his love. But marriage and dating are two different things. Then our first child came. We adored our baby: the pregnancy was easy, the birth was easy. My mother was already very ill, although I had no idea that only three and a half years later she would be gone.

My husband is a good man, although he doesn't always understand my dreamy nature, and many times it felt as though the two of us were pulling our cart in opposite directions. I knew I had to hold our family together, even when there were moments when I wanted to run away from everything. I had everything, and yet emotionally I was still like a child. Sometimes the whole world felt like a burden.

Then our second child was born, and barely three weeks after the delivery my mother — my refuge — died. I was thirty-five. It was January 2.

I thought everything would collapse. I felt that I had nobody left. Who would give me strength now? The children were tiny, I was emotionally immature, and although I had survived everything until then… I could not fall apart. Instinct was stronger. My baby could not feel my despair; I had to breastfeed, raise a preschooler and behave more responsibly toward my husband too.

I had to make a decision: either face every fear, get back on my feet and finally grow up, or drive away the good man who had loved me all along.

Slowly, day by day, somehow I managed. I learned to experience pain instead of running from it. Little by little I processed and released the traumas that childhood and my younger years had given me.

I also gradually worked on the physical changes caused by pregnancy and childbirth, and today a contented woman looks back at me from the mirror. I learned not to walk through life wrapped in sorrow and self-pity. I learned to face my fears and understand that, ultimately, I am the one who has to find solutions to them.

I learned to accept the love of others and remain open to change. Freedom can also be created within a marriage, with enough mutual adaptation and by leaving one another room to move. A woman can glow through the love of a man, and a man can shine through hers.

I accepted myself with all my flaws and all my qualities.

I love my life.

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